“Parsley Does Thyme”: A Self-Published Wonder

The Upper East Side Cookbook series, a set of faux memoirs (and recipes), was launched in 2009 with the publication of “The Upper East Side Cookbook: Setting the Table in a Time of Slender Means.” That volume was followed, in 2011, by “The Upper East Side Cookbook: Main Course”; the third and most recent volume, “Parsley Does Thyme,” was released last month. The series chronicles the progress of its heroine, the chef Parsley Cresswell, through the worlds of fashion journalism and high-end kitchens, but more particularly the series is a beautiful demonstration of both the ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit required by New York freelance life, and the kind of eccentric undertaking that electronic self-publishing makes possible.

The books are the work of Linda Olle, a longtime resident of Carnegie Hill. Although the books are carried in her neighborhood’s bookstores, as Olle explained recently, “the publishing world is so depressed, I didn’t even bother looking for a publisher.” She publishes them on her own through The Parsley Press.

All three Parsley volumes are, one way or another, narrated from behind bars—prison bars, that is (more about that later). The first two volumes are told in the voice of Parsley’s dowdy neighbor, Fran E. Smith, a chartered accountant and Wall Street employee. At the opening of “Slender Means,” she receives a call from Parsley, who, having just arrived at Riker’s Island, asks Smith to take care of her parrot, Gougère. While rummaging around for birdseed, Smith, who had just been reading about one of Parsley’s exploits on Page Six, discovers Parsley’s memoir—a “meditation on life in the fast lane” that includes recipes, handwritten menus, guest lists, and invitations. The series is thus born.

“Parsley Does Thyme,” however, is narrated from prison by Parsley herself and has a different tone than its predecessors. Although Parsley makes light of her prison experience—she attempts to accessorize her prison jumpsuit and refers to her jail as “Camp Crêpes Suzette,”—the book is less sunny: more narrative, fewer recipes.

One recent evening, I sat down with Olle, a stylish woman of perhaps sixty, with frosted blond hair, at a window table in Carnegie Hill’s Le Paris Bistrot. Olle is a veteran laborer in the vineyards of the New York fashion and publishing worlds; she’s had gigs at Prairie Home Companion, The Nation, W, InStyle, and, most recently, DuJour magazine, where, as contributing editor, she marvelled at the amounts of time her fellow employees spent Skyping apartment-bound pets. While she scanned the menu and chose foie de veau naturel à l’échalotte, I asked how the series got started.

“I’d been living in Edinburgh, writing a blog with recipes,” she said. “I was coming back to New York and had the idea of writing a regional cookbook, for a region where people go out for dinner and no one cooks for themselves.” But that was late in 2007; after the financial crisis hit, Olle adjusted her concept to be, as she puts it, a cookbook for “people who were now cooking at home but could only shop at twenty-four-hour stores.”

As befits her objective, Olle’s cuisine is practical, but also ingenious. There are recipes for hangover soup (a root-vegetable winter soup), onion pie (fried onion and shredded cheese in a pastry shell), and an improbable Midwestern recipe, “popcorn cake” (popcorn, salted nuts, chocolate chips, and butter in a Bundt pan).

The recipes, however, are filtered though Parsley’s exploits. Olle’s fictional creation learns basic sauces from the sous-chef at Chanterelle, marries (briefly) a one-time star at City Opera, and claims to have dated Bob Dylan and to have fed him a “country pie” (cheddar-cheese crust with a vegetable filling), which he likes well enough to write a song about.

“She’s an alter ego for me,” Olle explained. “She’s much freer than I am.”

Despite her glamorous lifestyle, Parsley is perpetually broke. The books are also notable for Parsley’s tactics to stretch her meagre earnings: she cooks with pumpkins discarded after Halloween; pulls yesterday’s papers out of recycling; finds her cocktail dresses at rummage sales at the Church of the Heavenly Rest; and, while at restaurants, discreetly stretches her wine by adding water.

Parsley is originally from Wisconsin, as is Olle, who grew up on a farm, outside Racine, where her Bohemian grandmother was a celebrated cook. Baking days were Fridays and Saturdays. “We had kolaches, veal, rabbit, and, when Italian plums were in season, we had plum dumplings as a main course. They were covered with sugar and cinnamon and surrounded by fresh carrots and beans. There’d be cream over everything.”

And how did Parley’s wholesome beginnings lead to a life of crime?

“In Parsley Does Thyme,” Parsley herself explains: the modest credit card debt she hoped to erase, the need to make more per hour than she made as a fashion reporter, the fact that “the dominatrix uniform looked fantastic” and made her feel “as if she’d been dressed by Jean Paul Gaultier.” During a dominatrix session, an eighty-year-old, hedge-fund-owner client suffers a heart attack. Against her better wisdom, Parsley stays to administer C.P.R., call 911, and await the arrival of the cops. It turns out the deceased had been under investigation for running a Ponzi scheme. Parsley won’t talk. That’s where the problems begin.

Olle is fascinated by financial-collapse culprits, including Bernie Madoff, who was a partial inspiration for the deceased hedge-fund manager. “He used to live in the neighborhood,” she told me. She’s also fascinated by Martha Stewart and especially by the time Stewart spent in prison. “She came from a working-class Catholic family not unlike my own,” Olle said. “In prison, she cleaned all the public spaces and was well liked. She even somehow made crème brûlée in the prison microwave. I never could figure that out.”

Asked if Parsley’s presence in prison in any way represents a discreet form of Upper East Side social commentary, Olle would only paraphrase Parsley’s own observation, that the Upper East Side and prisons “are gated communities that suffer from an imbalance of power.”

Illustration: Marc Rosenthal.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.